Eric White Why don’t we just kind of start there of where is the state of federal civil service reform, obviously, it may be due to change depending on how things go election-wise in the future. But looking at the big picture today, what do you see?
Jeff Neal Well, right now, I’d say that we’re not really getting civil service reform. We didn’t get any in the last administration. We really haven’t gotten what I would consider to be reform in this administration. This administration, with DOGE, undertook some pretty ill-advised actions to reduce agencies without actually doing the analysis necessary to determine what changes were really needed and what the impact, what the outcomes of their changes would be.
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Eric White Yeah, I don’t want to interrupt you, but yeah, I just want to make the distinction that reform, federal civil service reform, doesn’t mean just change for change sakes. I mean, it’s interesting that you say we didn’t see any actual federal civil service reform during this administration and somebody may hear that if I sound clip that and go, what are they talking about?
Jeff Neal Yeah, reform generally implies making something better and taking a chainsaw to something like Elon Musk did isn’t reforming it. It’s just breaking it. And there’s this old Silicon Valley adage, move fast and break things. That’s fine if you’re talking about a tech company, it’s not fine if you’re talking about the United States government, because people can’t, the American people, in many cases, cannot accept the consequences of a broken government. And they expect their federal agencies to actually carry out their mission, not to just be broken for the sake of breaking them. So I think reform is important. And, frankly, I think the federal government needs reform. I think civil service needs reform, it hasn’t really had any significant reform in about 75 years. Some people would argue the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was massive reform. It was reform, and it was, for the most part, good reform. But the basic underpinnings of the civil service are what they were after the Classification Act was passed more than 75 years ago. So what we end up with is a 1950s civil service. And a 1950s civil service in 2025, it’s not meeting the requirements. If you look at the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey — which apparently the Trump administration doesn’t want to do anymore — when you look at that survey, a substantial number of employees tell you that their organizations have poor performers that the agencies just don’t deal with. And so that really kind of drags down the federal workforce. It affects the reputation of the federal workforce, even though the numbers of people who are not doing their jobs are really quite small. So that lack of reform I think is important. I think we need really significant reform. That’s what got me started looking at this series that I’m doing on civil service reform.
Eric White Yeah, let’s take a positive turn here. You laid out some of the issues, not all of them obviously because we only have a few minutes. There are solutions out there, and there are areas of improvement that we’ve seen, as you know, the founders wanted, these states can be worked as these little hubs of experimentation for governance, and it seems as if you are highlighting some of these examples of where they can draw ideas from, one of them being Tennessee. Can you explain to me why Tennessee seems to be taking some steps in the right direction?
Jeff Neal Sure. When I started looking at this, I was looking at what was happening in state government, because you’re absolutely right that state government really is kind of like a, in many respects, can be a laboratory for testing out ideas for the larger federal government. And I started state governments that had gone to either at-will employment or some hybrid of a traditional civil service protection and characteristics of at-will. And what I assumed, I’ll be very honest, I went into it with a bias thinking anything even remotely resembling at-will employment in a government context is bad. That was my bias going into it. And so I started looking for the evidence that would prove that I was right. So I started looking at what state governments had done. And I came across Tennessee. And what surprised me with Tennessee is, number one, even though Tennessee is clearly what we call in today’s political vernacular a red state, the major reform they passed, which was the Tennessee Excellence, Accountability, and Management Act, the TAME Act, was actually done in consultation with and with the approval of their largest state employee organization. It’s not exactly a union, but it really does represent the interest of the state employees. And they’ve done this, they did this 13 years ago. And when I started looking to see, okay, what bad things happened as a result of it, none, really, there were no bad things. And there were a lot of good things. They replaced and simplified their hiring process. They gave hiring managers a lot more discretion and accountability. Discretion is only good if it comes with accountability. If you give people discretion and no accountability, then all you’ve done is created a recipe for chaos. They streamlined their application process. They simplified their performance appraisals. They tied performance ratings directly to pay raises and to retention. They started aligning their training with performance, which is what any good training person tells you you should be doing. They got rid of career tenure for new hires and created something called a preferred service category. They eliminated the traditional tenure protections, the civil service protections for people hired after July of 2013. And what they ended up with was they started filling jobs much more quickly. They started getting more applications because they had simplified the process. I’m sure you’ve heard people talking about the federal hiring process for a long time and how nobody in their right mind would start out with an intent to design a good hiring system and come up with what the federal government has, it’s a miserable system and it turns people off. Tennessee had the same type of approach. When they simplified it and made it easier to apply, made the process more understandable, the number of applicants grew by more than 60%. And so they started seeing, year after year, big increases in the number people applying. And then the other thing they found is that once they got people hired, the turnover went down. Turnover went down 22% in 2024. So that meant they had fewer vacancies, they had a more stable workforce. You would think making it less secure wouldn’t give you more stability. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but it actually created a more stable workforce. Turnover went from, in 2022, they had 18% turnover. 2023, they had under 13% turnover, so those things were improved. They started filling jobs in 47 to 53 days. The federal government fantasizes about being able to fill jobs in 80 days, and can’t meet that target for the most part. Tennessee is doing it in 47 to 53 days. They actually did more in the area of diversity. I know there are some people who think that diversity, equity and inclusion is a dirty word or dirty words, but when you think about it, diversity is a bad thing, equity, treating people fairly is a bad thing, inclusiveness is a bad thing? I don’t think so. And apparently that red state doesn’t think that either. They thought that diversity and outreach were important. So what happened with this is they made significant reforms, they got great outcomes, and people like it better. So I think the federal government needs to look at that type of reform and really be willing to make changes. The amount of trust in government has gone down a lot in recent years. And one of the ways you get it back is you make the federal workforce more credible by making it clear that people who don’t perform are gone and the people who do perform are rewarded. And so I think that’s really what we need to think of in the federal government. If the Democrats take over the Congress again and get the White House back in three years, I don’t want to see them just make things back to the way they were. Ironically, because I think there will need to be some building back, and I think it needs to be done in a different way, not just try to restore what we had prior to the beginning of the Trump administration. So ironically, what we need to do is build back better, which was the slogan of the Biden administration that they never quite carried out the way they intended. That’s what I think we need in the next few years, is to actually try to build back the federal government in a better way, in a way that’s more responsive to the American people, that gets better results for the people and costs less money, because most of us would agree the federal government is far too expensive.
Eric White We’ll touch on the credibility of government work itself in a moment, but I don’t want to scoop you, you are doing this as part of a series. I was wondering if we may be able to get a preview of some of the other states that you have seen take some of these ideas that you saw come to fruition in Tennessee. Are there other states that are doing something similar, and are there other states that are going about it at a different approach and also having success? Like I said, as much as you want to scoop yourself, by all means, feel free to.
Jeff Neal Well, I’m not going to scoop myself because I’m not going look at other states. The ones I’ve looked at, there have been some where the reforms they did were very contentious, where they have had more turnover and they’ve really kind of used them to politicize the workforce a bit. And what I wanted to do was look at a success, and the best success story I found was Tennessee. So the next thing I want to talk about in the next article, that’s probably a week or two out. I’ve found since I retired, I take a lot more time to write stuff because I have other things to do these days.
Eric White You’re your own editor.
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Jeff Neal But the next one is going to talk about how you could actually implement something and what it would look like in the federal government. So that’ll be the third and probably final article in the series.
Eric White Gotcha. All right. And so yeah, while I do have you, I did want to pick your brain a bit. We’re in the midst of a government shutdown as of this taping right now. And I’m curious of, from a human capital standpoint, how do you all factor in the weight that, hey, come work for the federal government, by the way, every so often you may have a disruption in pay and in work because whatever is going on on Capitol Hill, they can’t come to any sort of agreement. Is there a quantitative mechanism that you all factor into your recruitment and retainment efforts when it comes to explaining to folks of, this is a risk that you may face when you’re entering this kind of work?
Jeff Neal What you do probably has changed dramatically over the last, almost, say, 10 months or so. The federal government is a weird employer. Very few companies have a board of directors where every other day, half of the board of directors goes out onto the steps of the company and bad mouths the company in the workforce. So that’s very different from the private sector. Even with shutdowns, the federal government traditionally has been a remarkably stable employer, and you can go to work for the federal government when you’re right out of school and have a career that lasts decades, work in multiple agencies, doing different types of work and have very stable employment. I think with all the DOGE cuts we saw early in the Trump administration, that argument, that even with periodic shutdowns, the federal government is remarkably stable, is no longer a selling point because people look at what happened with DOGE and they see that that stability has been really significantly damaged. Frankly, I think I would find it difficult to market the federal employer as a great employer right now simply because the administration’s doing some things that just don’t seem to be backed up by data or analysis or forward thinking or anything else. They just appear to be destructive. And so I think marketing the federal government as an employer of choice is more difficult. It’s still, for the vast majority of employees, it’s more stable than a lot of companies are because the typical company, particularly publicly traded companies, will go out and whack parts of their workforce to juice the stock prices. And I’ve seen that happen firsthand. So in many respects, the federal government still is a better employer than a lot of people, a lot of companies in the private sector. And some of the benefits are better, not all of them, but some of the benefits are better. Pay might or might not be better depending on the occupation. Generally, the higher up in grade levels you go, the less better the federal pay is. And at some point, you probably make more working in the private sector than you do in the federal government. But right now, it’s a difficult sell to tell people that the federal government is a place that if you’re 22 years old and just got a college degree, that you should immediately go looking at the federal governments. I would not in good conscience make that argument to somebody at that age who was asking for my advice, unless it was very specific agencies where I think they’re still going to be extremely stable. The Department of Defense, I think is, even though it did do some cuts with DOGE, it’s still a massive employer and it’s still a very stable employer and Democrats and Republicans alike generally agree that we don’t want to weaken the Department of Defense, although frankly, I think we could cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of the Department of Defense and not affect national security. But that’s a different subject.
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